In a psychologically demanding game like poker, winning involves outthinking and outwitting your opponents and is a far cry from force-of-will sports like weightlifting, where a desire to push weight always wages war with a countervailing impulse to let go of the damned thing before gravity destroys you.
Selectivity and aggression require players to take a position somewhere between those two extremes to optimize the chances for success. "Do I push, pull, or fold; or do I simply wait and see what develops before committing my chips to the pot?" That's always the
question, isn't it?
Lines of strategic play can vary dramatically depending on the skill, sophistication, and psychological makeup of your adversaries. That's an important point, and one that vexes some very bright players who become frustrated when their psychological ploys fail against shallow opponents who are not even aware that something's going on.
The worst of your opponents don't think at all. There's no use trying to induce them towards a certain course of action when they won't even notice what you're doing. Even if they were aware of your moves, they might not care. This is the "Dumb and Dumber" school of poker, and these players are going to play their own hand. Period. End of story.
But let's look at how that story begins. Suppose you raised before the flop with A-Q suited and came out betting into a K-9-7 rainbow flop. Dumb-and-Dumber will call your raise with 5-4 and keep calling until he wins by catching the four that pairs his hand on the river. He's looking at his cards and never sees anything else. And why not? He's having way too much fun bucking the odds and trying to draw out.
You can't bluff, and shouldn't semi-bluff this guy, which can frustrate thinking players because it takes arrows out of their quivers and snaps them into twigs. Mr. Dumb-and-Dumber can turn an otherwise exciting game into a repetitive game of showdown, with strategy reduced to betting for value with the better hand, and all the cat-and-mouse elements of psychological manipulation removed from the contest.
But most opponents are not totally clueless. Some will put you on a hand, although many opponents will lock in on a single hand and never consider the range of possibilities one should infer from your betting action. This can work to your advantage. Suppose you raised before the flop with A-Q suited and flop J-9-3 with two of your suit. If your opponent has locked you in on a pair of jacks, he may never realize you've made the nut flush if a third suited card falls.
It's almost impossible to put someone on a single, specific hand on the flop, and whenever an opponent confesses that he put you on a single hand rather than a range of equally likely possibilities, you can assume that your opponent is thinking about your hand in a very simplistic manner.
When trying to think your way into your opponent's hand, you won't be able to pinpoint the precise cards he's holding initially, but you will be able to assign a likely range of holdings and boil them down to a precious few based on his betting patterns, the texture of the board, and the actions of any other players involved in the hand.
A sharp player thinks about his hand and your hand as well as what you think his hand might be. That's three levels of thought, and you can go deeper too. There's really no end to the possibilities, but beyond three levels it's a game of wheels within wheels, and once you're thinking beyond level three, you run the risk of going one level too deep and faking yourself out of the pot.
When the game becomes that cerebral, perhaps the very best thing you can do is find an easier one, or simply play your own cards for whatever inherent value they have, add a dose of game theory for the required deception, and save yourself the migraine you'll probably wind up with after a few hours at that table.
Visit Lou Krieger online and check out all his books at www.loukrieger.com. You can read his blog at http://loukrieger.blogspot.com and write directly to him at loukrieger@aol.com.
